The increased adoption of mobile, social and cloud computing is driving growth in security spending among organizations that are also becoming more aware of threats on all those fronts.

Worldwide spending on information security will top US$71 billion this year, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2013, with the data loss prevention segment recording the fastest growth at 18.9 percent, research firm Gartner said Friday.

Research director Lawrence Pingree pointed to what he called the “democratization” of security threats, with malicious software tools that can be used to launch advanced attacks now more broadly available online via an underground economy. While this has made life even more difficult for CISOs, it has also resulted in increased awareness. Security is no longer seen as just an IT function or a cost center, he said.

The growing popularity of hosted applications and infrastructure is also changing the security sector. In 2015, roughly 10 percent of overall IT security enterprise capabilities will be delivered as a cloud service, Gartner said. Small and medium sized companies will rely on hosted security services to an even greater extent.

Unfortunately, many organizations continue to lack staff with the appropriate security skills. To keep up with hackers, more than half of organizations will by 2018 rely on security services firms that specialize in data protection, risk and infrastructure management, according to Gartner.

Regulatory compliance has been a major factor driving spending on security in the last three years, particularly in the U.S, according to Gartner. Privacy and data protection laws in various stages of implementation or planning in Australia, the European Union, Singapore and Malaysia will further help drive growth.